Road Bike Q Factor
The wider the tread the farther apart your feet will be.
Road bike q factor. Q factor is the horizontal distance between the inside points of the crank arms on your bike. Proven on paper and the wind tunnel but most importantly on the road. What will the next manufacturing innovation be in road bike frames. Road cross bike q factors feel uncomfortably narrow to me vs a standard mountain bike and i feel it negatively affects my ability to produce decent power.
Factor s one goes beyond aerodynamics pushing boundaries as the fastest aero road bike ever. Q factor is a function of both the bottom bracket width axle length and the crank arms. Manufactures use a standard q factor measurement range of about 150mm for road bikes and 170 mm for mountain bikes. Q factors over 210 mm start to feel too wide to me i find i have a hard time transfer my weight quickly from pedal to pedal when standing and trying to accelerate and at this width my knees start to get pretty sensitive to cleat set up.
Stance width is a combination of two essential measurements. Let s discuss a bike industry secret that might be the most important metric you never heard of. Stance width is important for a proper pedal stroke. The q in q factor relates to the waddling gait and wide.
Factor finally plunged into the gravel game with their own lightweight performance oriented twist. It is generally considered a good idea to keep the tread fairly narrow. Bottom brackets axles vary in length from 102mm to 127mm. The q stands for quack a reference to the wide stance and waddling gait of ducks.
The tread or q factor of a crankset is the horizontal width of the cranks measured from where the pedals screw in. Yes we are talking today about q factor and stance width. Q factor is the distance between the outside face of your crankarms and spindle length the distance from the crankarms to the center of the pedal body fig. It isn t uncommon to find q factor measures that fall in between or.
Mountain bike cranks are typically about 20mm wider than road cranks. Q a with factor s owner rob gitelis jun 3 2020 alex dowsett from israel start up nation hosts a live q a with factor bikes and black inc owner rob gitelis read a selection of answers from the event below.